CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.

Apparently, cutting out the faces of ex-boyfriends dates back to the mid-1600s. (Actually, this an intermediate plate from when Cromwell's head was replaced with Charles I's. See the before and after of Pierre Lombart's engraving here.)

While geometers continue to puzzle over "squaring the circle," Prof. Oddfellow has circled the square with an interactive mandala for four-square breathing. Tackle stress, anxiety, or panic attacks. Click the image to load the page.

One derogatory term for glam rock is "hair band." Yet all bands are "hair bands." Even buzz-cut Sinead O'Connor was a hair band, for "Thesis and antithesis are inseparable, like an object and its shadow" (Pavel Aleksandrovich Florenskiĭ, The Pillar and the Ground of the Truth, 1997).

* A manual for typographers published in 1917 acknowledged that there are many beautiful forms of the ampersand, yet it forbade their use in "ordinary book work." Extraordinary books are another matter. Our lavishly illustrated Ampersand opus explores the history and pictography of the most common coordinating conjunction.

I was thrown into some sort of strange loop while watching the Pet Shop Boys "Pandemonium" concert. Neil Tennant was lip-synching a duet with Dusty Springfield. The dearly departed Springfield appeared in the form of a massive projection. Not only was she not present (except in spirit), but she was lip-synching, too, as her filmed footage wasn't of a live performance. There was Neil Tennant, "pausing" his lip-synched stanza to make sonic space for the projection of a deceased woman to lip-synch her own pre-recorded chorus. I was left . . . well . . . speechless.

NEW

The semicolon's inky side is facing the reader. The semicolon is not visible, except during thick clouds of ignorance which eclipse literature. The illuminated side of the semicolon faces away from the reader, like a moody child. This means that the reading lamp, reader, and semicolon are almost in a straight line, with the semicolon in between the reading lamp and the reader. The semicolon that we see looks very dark, like holes in the face of a mask.

"It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: If we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal."—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Thanks to the New Straits Times for recommending our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary and noting that it features "More than 1,000 surprising — and revealing — definitions of each singular letter in the English alphabet; everything from 'a per se' to 'a hypothetical explosive.'"

—Bruno Schulz, “The Republic of Dreams”, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, 1934; translated by Celina Wieniewska.

* Though printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant colour. In this rebus-style puzzle, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes. Try to guess the exact hue of each. Roll your mouse over the colored boxes to reveal the missing words. Click the colored boxes to learn more about each hue. Special thanks to Paul Dean for his colorful research.

Jeff Stone is perfectly correct in colorfully noting that "there's no freakin' X in the word 'especially.'" Yet we can't help fondly remembering those centuries when the word "expecial" meant "singular" or "exceptional," as in the context of accessories designed "to meet the expecial needs of the physician" (Brooklyn Medical Journal, Vol. 8, 1894) or European colonists in the Potomac being advised not to expose themselves to the danger of the Tuscarora War of 1711 "without expecial necessity" (James Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 2009).

Our favorite context for the word "expecial" is, of course, the world of algebra! Back in 1919, a textbook entitled First Course in Algebra embodied "an expecial effort to connect the elements of algebra in a clear and forcible manner with the affairs of every-day life." If any field is qualified to put an X in "especially," it's algebra!

* Payphones used to take dimes, but now they take quarters. Isn't
it time to update song lyrics to reflect the realities of
inflation? Alas, it's vastly easier to rhyme the word "dime" than
the word "quarter," but here at Inflationary Lyrics Headquarters we
have risen to the challenge. Please join the fun and share your
own inflationary lyrics, with both the "before" and "after" versions!